XSLT Extensibility
Despite the apparent complexity of XSLT, it’s limited in many ways compared to programming languages, and one of the first things that XSLT processors did was to start introducing extensions to XSLT. For example, Saxon introduced the <saxon:while> element that implements a programming-style while loop in XSLT. Xalan introduced elements such as <redirect:write>to support multiple output documents. And Microsoft’s MSXML3 processor enables you to write functions in scripting languages such as JavaScript and then call them to execute the code in them.
One can imagine W3C viewing this trend with trepidation. Their job, after all, is to standardize how languages such as XSLT work, but manufacturers were introducing their own, non-standard ...
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